They still do not get it. After twelve days of lockdown, and though the peak of the epidemic has still not arrived, the French government has been churning out statements and continuing to spout off in all directions, out of step with what is happening on the ground. While the majority of government ministers and advisors defend the government's actions and decisions, others are privately starting to get worried about the image the executive is portraying of itself during its handling of the Covid-19 coronavirus crisis.
At the moment such criticism is aimed at the style rather than the substance of what the government is doing. No ministerial advisors risk questioning the decisions taken by the government since January and even less so those taken most recently. The claims made by former health minister Agnès Buzyn – who says she alerted the government about the dangers of the epidemic at the end of January – have made them all doubly cautious. And the sense of national unity that all the political opposition – with the exception of far-right leader Marine Le Pen – seem happy to go along with during the crisis still endures.
However, in many ways the manner of explaining one's policies is simply the content of those policies coming to the surface. And that style is cruelly exposing the government's faults, its shortcomings, methods of thinking and, too, the tensions that are now sometimes apparent. The government's style of communication also acts like a magnifying mirror: revealing how some of the members of the government seem even more out of touch than usual, how others are weaker, and how others are even more cocky.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The number of different voices, the sometimes contradictory instructions – for example the advice for older people to stay at home while also insisting it was safe to vote in the local elections on March 15th – and convoluted arguments that fly in the face of good sense have continued to blur the government's message at a time when clarity is needed above all. These shortcomings reveal the deep-seated hard-wiring of a government that has, since it came to power in 2017, been guided by an economic compass that it still refuses to abandon. They also highlight an inability on the part of the presidency to recognise its own mistakes.
Health professionals have been saying for years that they have been abandoned in favour of budget-led management of public services. Abandoned, too, in the name of neo-liberal logic and the supposed efficiency that goes with it. And abandoned, also, by a technocratic government cut off from reality. Emmanuel Macron is the pure product of this approach, as shown by all the policies that he has adopted in the last three years, and as confirmed by his handling of this virus crisis.
On the evening of Wednesday March 25th the president gave his third public speech in three weeks from a military field hospital set up at Mulhouse in the east of the country. Immediately he picked up once more on the war theme, stating that the “first nurse fell at Compiègne [in northern France]”, as if speaking of a soldier at the front rather than a nurse who died from the virus. He also promised a “massive plan of investment in and review of hospitals”, seeming to accept that the emergency plan for hospitals he had boasted about it November 2019 was not in fact up to the job.
Since his second public speech on March 16th, the president has done all he can to don the mantle of “war leader”, according to an expression which his entourage happily accept despite its unfortunate connotations. As the economist Maxime Combes, spokesperson for the alter-globalization organisation Attac, wrote recently: “...we don't want to be governed like wartime but like in a time of pandemic...”.
It does not seem to matter that the warlike tone from Emmanuel Macron sounds false; he believes in it. And for those who do not appreciate it he sweeps away the criticism by referring to the need for national unity, exactly as he did at the time of the blaze at Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris in April 2019. “When you are involved in a war, you are completely involved, you work together in unity. I see in our country elements of division, doubts, all those who today would like to divide the country when we should have just one obsession: to be united in fighting the virus,” he said.
However, the government itself has not been immune to those doubts to which the head of state referred. The first of these doubts became apparent when it became clear there was a shortage of masks for medical staff, at the very start of the crisis. To avoid talking about a shortage the government initially tried to defuse the row by explaining that these masks were useless in most cases anyway, and could even be dangerous when not used properly.
But faced with the general consternation and anger that these arguments naturally provoked, the Ministry of Health ended up admitting that the stocks were indeed empty. Who was to blame? Naturally enough it was previous governments. “Whatever the decision-making process it was that led to these stocks not being renewed in the long term, it is still the cases that the stocks of these masks reduced year by year,” said health minister Olivier Véran. In doing so he picked up on the now familiar refrain from Macron supporters that problems always stem from the past; and thus that they cannot just be blamed on the current administration.
Two former health ministers, Xavier Bertrand, who served under President Nicolas Sarkozy from 2010 to 2012, and Marisol Touraine, who served during President François Hollande's presidency from 2012 to 2017, defended themselves against these criticisms. It was also pointed out that Marisol Touraine's ministerial office at the time included several people who have gone on to play a prominent role in Macron's presidency, including the president's former official spokesperson Benjamin Griveaux, the junior minister Gabriel Attal, and the current director general of health Jérôme Salomon. “The passing of the buck is a bit ridiculous,” said a former Macron supporter who has now left the fray. “They're all responsible.”
The coronavirus epidemic has in fact contaminated the fundamental elements of this government. The French people to whom the president now pays daily tribute are not those he described in 2017 as the “first in the rope team”, the better off who lead the way for others, a group that successive governments have fawned over. In fact those who, as the president himself says “enable the country to live during this crisis”, are precisely those who have been demonstrating for years for more resources. People who have invariably been dismissed in the past with the response that “there is no magic money”.
It is easy to understand the anger which has consumed health professionals who would have preferred to have been heard yesterday rather than applauded today. It is also easy to understand the anger of teachers, who have themselves been on strike in recent months. On Wednesday March 25th they were congratulated for their contribution by education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer, his way of correcting remarks by official government spokesperson Sibeth Ndiaye, who earlier in the day had appeared to state that with the schools closed teachers were no longer working – before apologising.
The government's entire public communications approach shows how out of touch it is with events on the ground. The eulogising coverage by Le Journal du Dimanche during the first weekend of the lockdown - March 21st and 22nd – with its photos from inside the Élysée Palace did not go down well with everyone. “With those gilded photos there was a sense of 'don't worry, the people at the top are thinking about the problems of those below',” objected one Member of Parliament from the president's own ruling La République en Marche (LREM) party. The president's visit to the military field hospital at Mulhouse last week was also out of sync with events, even more so given that the army's involvement is largely symbolic.
Just over a year ago the head of the ruling LREM group of MPs at the National Assembly, Gilles Le Gendre, said that the key players in Macron's political movement had “probably been too intelligent, too subtle” to be understood. Things are no longer expressed quite that way today but the reality remains the same: decisions are in the hands of those in the know who themselves admit they are not very knowledgable, something which has led to them appearing to fumble around for the right answer. Meanwhile the rest of us are urged to follow the orders and then counter-orders without batting an eyelid. “It's not the time to create controversies when you're at war,” stated the minister for public accounts Gérald Darmanin on Europe 1 radio on March 22nd.
The gulf which already divides society from its leaders is set to get even deeper. Two worlds are confronting each other. On one side are those doctors on the ground who had called for the postponement of the first round of the local elections on March 15th, who insisted that face masks were useful, who describe themselves as “mad with rage” at an “administration which anticipated nothing” and which was both “arrogant and incapable”. On the other side are the specialists who advise the government and who manage to theorise the exact opposite.
In the current situation the political calculations - concerning the local elections - and the economic priorities that can be discerned behind government comments are not just a source of confusion for the public. They are also hard to stomach, as several ministers privately admit. “That's just not good enough,” said one, after labour minister Muriel Pénicaud referred to the “defeatism” of an employers' organisation for telling building firms to stop work. “That's precisely the problem you get with a 'government of experts',” added a ministerial advisor with irritation.
Many observers think the epidemic is now publicly exposing the weaknesses of some members of the government. That was true in the case of junior environment minister Emmanuelle Wargon who Tweeted that she had tested positive for Covid-19 even though she only had “benign” symptoms, at a time when they was a controversy over whether prominent people were getting priority treatment when it came to being tested. “After this epidemic I think there will be a detailed review and a major upheaval,” predicted one government advisor.
Even the predictions that some MPs from the ruling LREM make off the record tell their own story about the mindset in government circles. “We have to strike hard, shake up the political landscape with a government of national unity. Why not [former president Nicolas] Sarkozy as prime minister? No one's thought of that,” one LREM MP told Challenges magazine. “In any case,” the MP continued, “the contest against [far-right leader] Marine Le Pen in 2002 [editor's note, the next presidential election] is clear, Emmanuel Macron has already won. He has established himself as the father of the Nation.” This line of thinking confirms one thing: that they have learnt nothing. Or perhaps, even worse, it shows that they have learnt only too well.
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- The French version of this can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter